A Look Back At 10 Memorable Performances By Team USA Women In Winter Sports In 2023

Team USA women continued to breaking barriers with their success in 2023, with notable results including world titles, iconic milestones and historic firsts.

You can follow along on their journeys throughout the year at TeamUSA.com, but to celebrate the new year, here are 10 of the most impressive performances by U.S. women (and one mixed team) in winter sports from 2023:

Madison Chock and Evan Bates, Figure Skating

Longtime partners Chock and Bates wrapped up what might have been the best of their 13 years as ice dance partners in December when they won the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final in Beijing. It was their first win in seven appearances at the Grand Prix Final, and it came only nine months after they claimed their first world title in Saitama, Japan. Chock and Bates, who are also a couple off the ice, have been among the world’s elite ice dancers for a generation. Since making their debut together in July 2011, they’ve racked up five medals while competing together at three Olympic Winter Games and 10 world championships. Their breakthrough in Japan made them the oldest ice dance world champions ever, but Chock, 31, and Bates, 34, go into 2024 looking as strong as ever.

Jessie Diggins, Cross-Country Skiing

Here comes Diggins, making history once again. Five years after her iconic moment at the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, when she and Kikkan Randall teamed up to win Team USA’s first Olympic cross-country skiing gold medal, the high-powered Minnesotan raced to Team USA’s first individual world title in the sport when she won the 10K freestyle in February in Slovenia. Over the last several years, the U.S. women have made themselves into true contenders in cross-country skiing. Diggins, with her rosy demeanor perhaps masking her killer instinct, is at the forefront of that. Her elite racing abilities show up each weekend on the world cup circuit, where the 32-year-old Diggins has already won three times this season. But her biggest races are coming up in February, when the world cup comes to Minneapolis. Diggins, of nearby Afton, Minnesota, was instrumental in securing the event, which is the first world cup on U.S. soil in 22 years.

Kendall Gretsch, Para Nordic

Gretsch practically stepped off the podium at the 2022 paratriathlon world championships and onto a new one at the 2023 Para Nordic skiing worlds. The dual-sport star from Downers Grove, Illinois, was back at it in 2023, earning seven medals in seven days at January’s Nordic world championships in Sweden. Among those medals were six golds, giving her totals of 13 golds and 21 medals for her career in the Nordic world championships. And then, sure enough, the six-time Paralympic medalist was back to her summer sport. Her paratriathlon season culminated in September when the 31-year-old took the silver medal at the world championships for the second year in a row.

Brenna Huckaby, Para Snowboard

Warm temperatures in La Molina, Spain, forced organizers to postpone the 2023 Para snowboarding world championships. When the event finally took place nearly two months later in March, Huckaby showed she’s still the standard bearer among the U.S. women’s snowboarders. The four-time Paralympic medalist — proudly displaying her prosthetic  — flew down the snow-covered Pyrenees mountains to claim a full set of medals, including gold in the dual banked slalom. It was the fifth world title, to go with three Paralympic gold medals, for the 27-year-old originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Kaillie Humphries, Bobsled

Humphries announced in December that she’s taking the 2023-24 season off to prepare for the birth of her first child next summer. And with that, the rest of the field in women’s bobsledding let out a collective sigh of relief. With three Olympic gold medals and five world titles, Humphries is considered the greatest women’s bobsledder of all time. That showed no signs of changing in 2022-23, when she won six world cups while never finishing outside the top four en route to the overall title. At age 37, she added silver (monobob) and bronze (two-woman bobsled) medals at the world championships in February, giving her a women’s record 10 career medals at the event.

Jaelin Kauf, Freestyle Skiing

Considered the fastest woman in moguls, Kauf, the reigning Olympic silver medalist, continued to put up big results in 2023. She opened the year with her first world cup podium, then added five more. Along the way she recorded her best world championships performance to date, winning silver medals in both the moguls and dual moguls events in February in Bakuriani, Georgia. The 27-year-old from Alta, Wyoming, has already gotten off to a fast start in 2023-24, too. On Dec. 9, she notched her first world cup win in three years when she won the dual moguls in Idre Fjäll, Sweden. Don’t look now, but dual moguls becomes an Olympic event in 2026.

Hilary Knight, Hockey

Knight didn’t have to do any more. Her status as one of the all-time dominant players in women’s hockey history was well established over her nearly two decades with the national team, a time that’s included an Olympic gold and three silver medals. And yet, Knight went out and did more. With Team USA trailing Canada late in the world championships gold-medal game this past April in Ontario, Knight sealed the eventual 6–3 Team USA win with a pair of power play goals just 27 seconds apart. The tallies gave her eight for the tournament, a hat trick for the game and made her the first woman to crack 100 career points at worlds — and then the first to hit 101, too. As an added bonus, Knight earned her ninth world title in the win while the U.S. snapped a two-year winning streak for Canada. At 33, Knight became the second oldest American woman to play in the world championships, and it didn’t appear she’ll be leaving anytime soon.

Kristen Santos-Griswold, Short Track

Santos-Griswold considered giving up the sport after a crash at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 dropped her from medal to position to a painful fourth place in the 1,000-meter event. Alas, she carried on, and now she’s racing faster than ever. After earning eight world cup medals in 2022-23, she’s already surpassed that in 2023-24 with two stops left to go. The 29-year-old Connecticut native closed out the fall season with eight individual medals and three relay medals in four world cups, boosting her to No. 2 in the overall standings. Among her three wins so far this season was one in the 500-meter, a distance no U.S. woman had won before on the circuit. Fittingly, Santos-Griswold did it on the same Beijing track where she crashed in 2022.

Mikaela Shiffrin, Alpine Skiing

Shiffrin broke her sport’s most hallowed record in 2023, and then she kept on winning. The iconic mark of 86 world cup victories, set in 1982 by the Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark, had long been a dream scenario for Shiffrin. Suddenly in 2023 the milestone was not just in striking distance, but the star from Edwards, Colorado, was practically barreling toward it. Shiffrin opened the season in November 2022 with a pair of wins, then won five in a row in a 13-day span ending Jan. 4, 2023. Four more wins (including three in a row) put her one shy of Stenmark. Fittingly, Shiffrin tied and then surpassed him in a pair of back-to-back wins in his native Sweden on March 10 and 11, just days before her 28th birthday. The two-time Olympic champion closed out the season with victory No. 14, just shy of her career best. And don’t forget, she also won a world title in the giant slalom in February. After passing Stenmark’s record, the question for Shiffrin became whether she could get to 100 world cup wins. Considering she enters the new year with five wins already in 2023-24, giving her 93 for her career, 100 is looking more like a question of when than if. 

Laurie Stephens, Para Alpine

Stephens burst onto the scene as a 20-year-old in 2004, and nearly two decades later she’s still got it. The alpine skier from Wenham, Massachusetts, added to her long list of accomplishments this past January when she won a trio of silver medals at the world championships in Spain. The five-time Paralympian and seven-time Paralympic medalist, now 39, finished second in the super-G, giant slalom and alpine combined events. Considered one of the greatest American sit skiers, Stephens was recently named to another U.S. national team for 2023-24.

Chrös McDougall has covered the Olympic and Paralympic Movement for TeamUSA.org since 2009 on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. He is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul.